I'm an award-winning suspense novelist, but in my free time I love to review books and my fave TV show Hawaii Five-O, as well as pass along great book deals, and eat Canadian chocolate---not necessarily in that order.

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Friday, June 8, 2012

Ms. Shreditor Goes to BEA

BookExpo America 2012

Last week, I promised to post about what I learned at
BookExpo America. Full disclosure: This was my first year attending, so I had
no concept of how quickly the day gets away from you when you’re navigating the
immense Javits Center in Manhattan—charging from booth to booth in the morning
and limping through them by the afternoon. If you ever go to BEA, be smarter
about your shoe choice than I was.

A feeling hits you when you first open the front doors (all
of which were plastered with Dean Koontz posters this year) and step into the
convention center. There you stand in the entryway, with its registration
tables that resemble airport ticket counters. Everywhere around you are people
whose life’s work is your life’s work: books.

But it isn’t until you go upstairs that you realize just how
expansive the book industry really is. As far as the eye can see are publisher
booths, autographing tables, workshops, and tech demonstrations—675,000 square
feet of them, to be exact. Yes, you read that right—over half a million square
feet of literary mayhem. It’s more ground than anyone can cover in a day. And
there’s more than just display copies and advance galleys—even C-SPAN 2 and its
Campaign 2012 tour bus were in the building. Most encouraging was the vast number
of new exhibitors.

A whole world of schmoozing unfolds on the exhibition floor.
Editors sit down with agents, publicists sit down with authors, etc. Business
cards fly from hand to hand, and they sometimes function as currency if you
want certain publishers’ catalogs. But nothing, and I mean nothing, beats the
author presence. There were all kinds of celebrities on deck Wednesday, and
that’s saying nothing of the celebrities in attendance on Tuesday and Thursday.
On the day I attended, there were author signings for Joyce Carol Oates, Jane
Seymour, Ian McEwan, Ina Garten, Rachael Ray, a host of popular YA authors, and
many others.

I had grandiose plans for the day and accomplished precious
few of them. There simply wasn’t time. I had hoped to go to the Lois Lowry
breakfast and the Neil Young/Patti Smith lunch event, but scheduling was not on my
side. I did, however, walk the floor with several of my colleagues and collect
catalogs from the competition. I dodged thousands of publishing executives, fellow
editors, librarians, booksellers, packagers, designers, layout artists, publicists,
agents, authors, book bloggers, and fans as I traveled from booth to booth. As I went,
I amassed a modest stack of advance review copies from various publishers. (A
word to the wise: Be selective when picking up freebies at an event like this. If
your timing is good, you’ll find that they flow pretty freely, but remember
that you have to lug them around all day.)

My most important lesson from BEA, however, came today when
I was back in the office. One of our executives told me that it was a good year to go
to the expo for the first time, as last year’s vibe was pretty subdued. After
all, Border’s was on the brink of closure back then, and e-book publishing
was still somewhat nebulous territory. That energy that hit me when I opened the
doors to the Javits Center was the current of an industry renewed.

So there are still homes for good manuscripts in the
traditional publishing sphere. I’ll keep doing what I can here on Julie’s blog
to help polish your prospective pieces. Who knows? Maybe one day you’ll be at
BEA doing a signing of your own.

I got goosebumps reading your post--really I did. I imagined so clearly everything you described. I want to go! More than that, though, I want to be sitting in one of those booths looking up at people wanting my newest release.

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